et you wouldn’t fully appreciate the audacity of this tactic by reading standard Beltway coverage. As Brian Beutler notes in Salon, Time Magazine reporter Zeke Miller calls this “negotiating technique… is by no means novel. Hostage taking — by promising harm if you do not get your way — has long been a standard way of doing business in Washington.” James Fallows, decrying what he calls a “failure of journalism,” flagged the headline, “Parties Digging in Their Heels as Hourglass Empties.” (The Courier-Post, a Gannett paper, similarly went with, “Lawmakers dig in their heels; government shutdown nearer.”) And Politico’s Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan described the ransom note as simply a set of “demands for reform.” All of this coverage reeks of false equivalency, implying yet again that “both sides do it.” Let’s conduct a brief thought exercise. In 2007, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and had deep political differences with then-President George W. Bush. Yet they passed a clean debt limit increase, with about as many Democrats as Republicans voting “aye.” But imagine, for a moment, that Democrats had held the House two years earlier, in the fall of 2005, less than a year after Bush’s re-election. And imagine further that in exchange for not breaching the debt limit and bringing economic catastrophe down on the citizens of the United States, they had demanded that the Republican Senate pass, and the Republican president sign into law, all of the following: single-payer health-care, a federal living wage law (indexed to inflation, of course), the elimination of all oil subsidies, a roll-back of Bush’s tax cuts on high earners, strict limits on campaign financing, new regulations of greenhouse gas emissions and an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. This imagined list of 2005 demands is no further from the majority’s agenda than what House Republicans offered Democrats and the White House last week. Yet it’s hard to imagine that Politico would have dismissed this 2005 list as merely “demands for reform,” or that Time would have suggested that such maneuvers were routine — the narrative would have been that Dems had gone completely bonkers. The difference is that, with a demographic tide going against them, Republicans have gradually jettisoned the norms that make democratic governance possible. First they filibustered virtually everything. Then they started creating these annual budget showdowns to fight for cuts in taxes and spending. Now they’re using the budget battle to advance the entire legislative agenda of the hard right. In essence, they have made crisis governance the new normal — but they did so incrementally. Like frogs in the proverbial pot, many journalists have slowly acclimated to these extreme, democracy-suffocating circumstances and now seem incapable of describing what’s they’re seeing. Framing everything as a standard-issue partisan fight is almost a professional imperative for many journalists. But there are three reasons this is wrong. First, this showdown has been authored by a relatively small number of Republican officeholders with just enough votes to force their leadership into a battle that will ultimately hurt the country. This important piece of information is often buried in Beltway coverage. Another Politico piece by Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan frames the “standoff” as “Senate Democrats and the White House at loggerheads with House Republicans” in the fourth paragraph. It’s only in the second-to-last paragraph that they acknowledge that it’s really “a small group of conservatives that have tied the hands of Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — just enough Republicans to prevent the leadership from being able to exert its will.” One reporter who got it right, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza looked at the 80 Republican lawmakers who signed a letter demanding that the party attempt to “defund Obamacare” – Lizza dubs them the “suicide caucus” – and noted that they “represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans.” And they are political outliers:
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:11:42 +0000
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